Visible minorities in the GTA increasingly supporting Conservatives: U of T study

2025/06/12 Leave a comment

Interesting and relevant study. Think the shift largely reflects economic concerns and affordability, particularly among younger voters, whether visible minorities or not, and the effectiveness of Conservative outreach and engagement:

Federal and provincial Conservatives are winning over more visible minority voters in the GTA, a new study has found.

According to researchers at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, visible minorities in the GTA, who make up more than half of the population, are increasingly backing Conservative candidates in federal and provincial elections. The study, out Wednesday, considers anyone, besides Indigenous people, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour as a visible minority, as defined by Statistics Canada.

The findings are based on federal and Ontario election results over the past two decades, including the two most recent national and provincial elections earlier this year.

“What used to be a weak spot for the right is now a growing base,” Prof. Emine Fidan Elcioglu and research assistant Aniket Kali wrote in the study, noting the Conservatives have historically been seen as the party of the white and wealthy, at least until recent years.

“The more diverse the riding, the stronger the Conservative numbers.”

The researchers point to the federal election in April as an example.

Ridings where visible minorities make up the majority shifted rightward by 10 to over 20 percentage points compared to the 2021 federal election — higher than the Conservatives national gain of 7.6 percentage points in the vote count. Most of these ridings are located in the 905 belt around Toronto, which the Star previously reported denied Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals a majority government thanks to a blue wave.

While the researchers had a sense that some visible minorities have shifted to the right when it comes to voting, the findings still had some surprises. 

“It was quite stark to see just how consistent the polls were over time,” Kali said in an interview.

There are multiple reasons for this shift in voting behaviour, according to the researchers.

First is a decades-long, concentrated attempt by the Conservative party to reach racialized communities through efforts such as multilingual ads and attending religious festivals. Conservatives have also recruited a lot of visible minority candidates — including more than the Liberals and NDP in the April federal election, according to a separate study.

All this, Elcioglu and Kali said, came as the Liberal party was increasingly being seen as “a party of broken promises” around affordability, housing and other issues.

“The Liberal arty and the sort of disenchantment with (Justin) Trudeau is certainly part of the puzzle,” Elcioglu said, “but it doesn’t explain everything.”

Another reason for the shift to the right is changing attitudes among second-generation Canadians.

In interviews with 50 second-generation Canadians around the GTA — most of whom were either South Asian or Chinese — Elcioglu said she heard that people thought voting Conservative meant becoming more “Canadian.”

“It’s a way to say, ‘I made it. I belong. I’m not voting like my Liberal party immigrant parents,’” Elcioglu said of the responses she heard in the interviews.

Although the study shows growing support among visible minority voters for the Conservatives, the researchers stressed that this group of people is not a monolith.

“Immigrants and minorities are a serious political constituency in the GTA.  They have serious issues and the party that organizes them on those issues and speaks to those issues is going to win some loyalty.”

Elcioglu said this understanding will be important for the Liberals and NDP if they want to win seats in future elections.

“Progressive parties shouldn’t assume that they have the support of racialized voters,” she said. “They need to do more listening and speak to the real issues.

“They need to go out into the suburbs.”

Source: Visible minorities in the GTA increasingly supporting Conservatives: U of T study

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , ,

Korea’s multicultural demographic changes call for new youth support policies

2024/06/27 Leave a comment

Of interest:

As the number of preschoolers from multicultural families dwindles due to the low birthrate, calls grow for systemic support for youth, away from current multicultural policies that focus primarily on underage children.

Experts underscore the importance of bolstering bilingual education. Rather than specifically differentiating children with multicultural backgrounds, they advocate for a more inclusive approach that benefits multicultural children.

According to a new report from the Korean Education Statistics Service, released Sunday, which highlights the major trends and challenges in multicultural education through statistics, there were 12,526 multicultural births in 2022. This accounts for 5 percent of the 249,186 total births in Korea in the same year.

Multicultural births in the report refer to cases where at least one parent is foreign or a naturalized citizen.

Considering there were 22,908 multicultural births in 2012, the number has declined sharply by more than 10,000 births, or approximately 45.3 percent, over the past decade. During this period, the decline in multicultural births mirrored the overall decrease in domestic births.

The average age for marriage within multicultural families is rising, and fewer babies are being born to women under 30, according to the report.

Specifically, the proportion of multicultural couples marrying under 24 fell from 30.8 percent in 2012 to 17.4 percent in 2022. Conversely, marriages involving individuals over 30 increased from 44.4 percent to 58.6 percent over the same period.

Additionally, the percentage of multicultural babies born to mothers under 29 dropped significantly, from 61.8 percent in 2012 to 31.3 percent in 2022.

A notable demographic shift is expected within Korea’s multicultural population, with a decrease in preschoolers and a gradual increase in middle and high school students, as well as adults in their early 20s.

As of 2022, 89.7 percent of all multicultural students are in elementary and middle school. Looking ahead, the proportion of middle and high school students, along with youth aged 19 to 24, is projected to rise.

Mo Young-min, vice chairman for research at the Korean Education Development Institute and author of the report, emphasized the necessity of policy-level attention and establishing a support system for youth with multicultural backgrounds, pointing out that current multicultural policies focus primarily on young children.

According to the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, it is expanding projects to provide fundamental education and career guidance, facilitating the smooth adaptation of children from multicultural families to school life.

Meanwhile, experts stress the need to prioritize bilingual education in support measures for children from multicultural families. They advocate for an approach that respects and incorporates the culture and language of their parents’ countries….

Source: Korea’s multicultural demographic changes call for new youth support policies

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Protests reveal generational divide in immigrant communities

2021/04/28 Leave a comment

Likely similar in Canada, as second generation grow up with Canadian expectations of equality and opportunity:

When protests began in a Minneapolis suburb after a white police officer fatally shot a Black man, 21-year-old Fatumata Kromah took to the street, pushing for change she says is essential to her Liberian immigrant community.

Meanwhile, 40-year-old Matilda Kromah feared stepping outside her home as trauma associated with the Liberian civil war suddenly rushed back into her life, two decades after she escaped the conflict.

The two women, whose shared last name is common among Liberians, have seen their lives changed amid the unrest that has sometimes engulfed Minneapolis in the months since George Floyd’s death. Their behavior also reflects a generational split: While Fatumata has been drawn into the protests, Matilda has tried to avoid them, focusing instead on running a dress shop and hair-braiding salon that is essential to sending her children to college.

The same divide has played out across the Twin Cities’ burgeoning Somali, Ethiopian, Liberian and Kenyan communities. Young people have thrust themselves into movements for racial justice, often embracing the identity of being Black in America. Older generations have been more likely to concentrate on carving out new lives rather than protesting racial issues in their adopted homeland.

When Fatumata visited Matilda’s shop this past week in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center, the topic was unavoidable. Matilda’s strip-mall storefront — Humu Boutique and Neat Braids — was vandalized in the aftermath of the April 11 death of Black motorist Daunte Wright. Thieves smashed windows and doors and took nearly everything of value, even stripping mannequins of their African dresses.

Tears formed in the elder woman’s eyes, and her hands shook as she spoke. Memories of the atrocities she had fled during the Liberian civil war had returned.

“Maybe war is starting again,” Matilda said of the demonstrations. “I was traumatized. For three days, I didn’t want to go out of my house. I was hiding in my room.”

But she needed to figure out a way to pay for her son’s college tuition, so she posted an “open” sign on the plywood covering the shop’s broken windows and began accepting customers. She did not have insurance to cover the losses, she said.

Fatumata, who chanted and yelled at protests, grew quiet as Matilda spoke. She agreed that the United States offered opportunities for education and a “better life,” but she had also made up her mind that such a life would not be complete without justice for Black people.

After moving to Brooklyn Center from Liberia in 2015, she said she was treated differently as a Black person. People commented on the color of her skin, disapproved of the clothes she wore and once called the police on her and a friend for being too “loud.”

“I started to realize like, ‘Oh, America is not what it says on TV,’” she said.

Then Floyd’s death sparked protests, and she decided that “this was not the American dream I was promised.”

Kromah is not alone. Young people in the city’s East African communities came out to protest in droves following Floyd’s death. Despite tension, at times, between Black immigrants from Africa and Black people whose long history in the U.S. began with slavery, protesters united around decrying police brutality they said plagued their communities.

The verse “Somali lives, they matter here,” often followed the protest refrain of “Black lives, they matter here.” And one of the most widely shared images of last year’s protests was a video posted on social media showing a protester in a hijab and a long skirt kicking a tear gas cannister back toward law enforcement officers in riot gear.

“I am Somali, I am Black American, I am Muslim,” 21-year-old Aki Abdi said. “If a cop pulls me over, he don’t know if I’m Somali or Black. They go hand in hand.”

When former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in Floyd’s death, celebrations broke out across the city, and Abdi and two friends made their way to George Floyd Square.

On the sidewalk down the street from where Floyd took his last breath, they scrawled the names of two Somali men — Dolal Idd and Isak Aden — who were fatally shot by Minnesota police in recent years. They hoped some people in the crowd would search those names on the internet. Police defended their actions in both shootings, saying the men had guns, but the men’s families have pressed for more thorough investigations.

Many older immigrants grew up in countries where speaking out against the government resulted in punishment, and some are so focused on making a living after escaping war-torn countries that they do not have time or energy for anything besides their families’ immediate well-being, said Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Younger Black immigrants who were born in America or came at a young age often know firsthand both their parents’ struggles and America’s history of racial injustice, Hussein said.

“By being squeezed by these two pressures, they have no option but to fight and to try to change the system.” he said. “The younger generation is propelled by this legacy of the fight that is happening in the country that they’ve adopted, but also the fight that their parents have been teaching them about in the country that they left.”

Fatumata Kromah’s mother, Rebecca Williams Sonyah, said parents like her fear for their children’s safety both in interactions with police and at demonstrations, all while trying to stay focused on the jobs and businesses essential to their livelihoods.

“Our children should have freedom. They should have equal rights,” Williams Sonyah said. “They shouldn’t judge our children because of their color or because of where their parents are from.”

She recognized her daughter’s activism as important to those goals but still pleaded with her to stay home after Wright’s death, knowing that destruction was likely. They compromised by agreeing that Kromah would return home before the curfews set by city authorities.

Williams Sonyah’s job in medical home care prevented her from joining in the marches in front of the police department. But she seemed sympathetic to the movement.

“If I had a way to go protest,” she said, “I would protest.”

Source: Protests reveal generational divide in immigrant communities

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,